Premier League clubs face daunting test of their resources as the Champions League begins this week

The lights are going on all over Europe as the Premier League’s claim to
supremacy faces its biggest ever test in this Champions League campaign.

Champions of Europe: Bayern Munich lifted the famous trophy at Wembley last season and now English clubs face an even tougher test of their resources as they look to make a name in the competitionPhoto: EPA

A summer of reinforcement across Germany, France and Spain especially has left England’s highest tier braced for impact after last season’s mass exit before the quarter-final stage.

These are daunting times for the masters of the universe who run the Premier League, who predicted several years ago that Europe’s super clubs would eventually fight back in the face of English football’s financial imperialism.

To prove that point, Cristiano Ronaldo said a definitive goodbye to Manchester United by signing a new contract worth £15m a year on the same weekend that Gareth Bale made his Real Madrid debut as the world’s most expensive footballer.

With their peacocks all out on the lawn, Real are also honking about the new Forbes valuation of their club, which rates them at $3.4 billion (£2.1 billion), a nose in front of United ($3.3 billion), who contest their 18th consecutive Champions League campaign, but this time without Sir Alex Ferguson, whose love for the European stage was kindled by the great Real Madrid sides of the 1960s.

“The nicest competition of the season,” as Bayern Munich’s Pep Guardiola calls it, is not played out on balance sheets, as Borussia Dortmund demonstrated in May by running Bavaria’s ‘FC Hollywood’ close in an all-German final at Wembley, where the two sets of fans sang: 'Football’s coming home'.

But there is a mounting sense that the cycle of English economic power is weakening, as Sheikhs and oligarchs pump money on to the continent and the likes of Real, Bayern and Barcelona exploit their vast commercial potential around the planet.

The Premier League’s policy of conquest-by-overseas-TV-rights and pre-season tours is being matched by their biggest competitors, who are now more skilled at promoting the mega-fame of their best players.

In the new celebocracy of football, Barcelona start a new European campaign with Lionel Messi and Neymar in a kind of Argentine-Brazilian shotgun marriage that seems to be going well.

Real Madrid’s new opiate for the masses is Ronaldo, Bale and Isco. Their centre-forwards, Benzema and Morata, might be wise to take a good book in case Ronaldo and Bale monopolise the attacking play.

In a wrecked economy, and a largely two-team league, Barcelona and Real are often accused of concealing the underlying weakness of La Liga. To which Spain might respond: can Mesut Özil joining Arsenal match the starburst over the Nou Camp and the Bernabéu?

In ear-shot of Roy Hodgson they might also mention that 58.7 per cent of starters in La Liga games at the weekend were qualified to play for Spain, compared to 32 per cent in England.

Not that the Premier League clubs are suddenly impostors at this level.

United can still aim Robin van Persie and Wayne Rooney at Bayer Leverkusen, Shakhtar Donetsk and Real Sociedad; Manchester City's underwhelming start to the season is not ascribable to failures in the transfer market (on the contrary, City did the best of the early business); Chelsea won the title in 2012 and have turned back to Jose Mourinho, who was victorious with Porto and Inter Milan; and Arsenal, who are perennial also-rans, have started their domestic programme with ‘jam today’ rather than tomorrow.

The purest excitement, though, is generated beyond these shores. With the rise of the French monoliths (no more égalitaire), Paris St-Germain start out with Edinson Cavani, Ezequiel Lavezzi and Zlatan Ibrahimovic across their forward line.

Last year’s finalists are hardly impoverished either, despite the complaint by Matthias Sammer, Bayern’s director of sport, that Guardiola’s team were “emotionless” and “lethargic” in their 2-0 win against Hannover 96 on Saturday.

With that victory Bayern extended their unbeaten streak in the Bundesliga to 30 matches. Their possession rate was 68 per cent. Yet such are the standards set by last year’s German treble-winners that Sammer thinks he can detect a brief dropping off in a comfortable win.

Thomas Müller, the Bayern forward, thinks it is simply a question of locating that “extra two or three per cent.” Since the current competition was born in 1993 no Champions League winner has retained the title 12 months later. This is Guardiola’s uber-challenge.

Dortmund, not Bayern, lead the German table, after a 6-2 win against Hamburger SV. Robert Lewandowski, their senior striker, praised Henrikh Mkhitaryan and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang – or “Micki and Auba” – their two new signings and called Dortmund “really impressive.” The omission in all this is the Italian representatives, who have embraced the new mainstream of quick, creativity-based play.

So the outlook for the Premier League quartet (plus Celtic) is more forbidding than at any point in recent memory.

The faintly listless start to the league campaign here is also shaping impressions of how the two London nominees and the Manchester candidates will fare in such a talent-rich competition.

The £630 million spent by English clubs over the summer did not raise self-esteem. Instead it focused attention on the shortage of superstar signings compared to France, Germany and Spain.

The Premier League knew this would happen. They never expected their new empire to be impregnable. Evolution was always prominent in their thinking.

Harvard business school models taught them that standing still is regression. This time, more than ever, the European combat will tell the truth about the Premier League’s strengths and flaws.